Seasonal energy storage in aluminium for 100% solar heat and electricity supply
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
These batteries are more efficient than aluminum energy storage, and were also aimed at large scale with cheap abundant materials (initially at least). But high temperatures involved make it not very convenient.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_battery#Liquid-met...
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/storage-integra...
Edit: This recent Real Engineering piece updates their current business situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PL32ea0MqM
https://teitimes.com/teaser/2021-02/#pf7
The first systems will go into the field as 40 kWh trial systems to demonstrate their effectiveness and operation. The pilot battery for Terra-Scale, which will be one of these trial systems, will be installed late 2021. A larger 1 MWh commercial-scale trial system will be installed in late 2022. Volume production will then start in 2023, at which time Ambri will build battery systems that are available in 1 MWh blocks and have discharge rates of 4 hours or longer.
That plant uses 1 % of Germany’s electricity. It’s not the only such plant, and Hermany generally frowns on frivolous uses of Aluminum: cans are far less popular, for example, and will earn you dirty looks.
The Audis may make up for it I part, but in the US it should be possible to shift some non-trivial fraction of the electricity consumption by, say, doubling processing capabilities and running them seasonally. Al isn’t too expensive, and the plant is a small part of the costs anyway, with energy making up the bulk.
Of course there are countless opportunities to optimize consumption patterns once consuming devices all have data connections: heat and cooling, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, roombas, notebooks... all these devices could shift their consumption on the hours-to-one-day scale and easily cushion even large variability in production. Once electric cars are ubiquitous, they‘ll make up the bulk of consumer electricity usage and they could even feed power back into the grid.
The only real problem with Al is, obviously, that we keep misreading it as AI. The confusion will drive some lesser Al insane, and either that or the singularity will cause a bloodbath, henceforth known as Al Gore.
I never heard nor experienced this myself in Germany. After all, almost all of they get recycled because their price includes a deposit you get back upon recycling.
I think the person who wrote that is being a bit satirically playful, here.
Aluminum fuel cells have a slow energy discharge rate, largely due to the Oxigen-Reduction Rate (ORR) limit, even when the air Cathode is doped in exotic catalysts such as Platinum.
Furthermore, fuel-cell Electrodes, be it an Aluminum-air or Hydrogen-air fuel-cell, suffer from "CO2 Poisoning", which makes their efficiency drop in open air.
Not commercialy viable.
Storage technology is capable of powering cities. Heck, the largest grid storage sites in the US are for backing up nuclear power plants on the East Coast (matching day/night loads with baseload supply). This silly infighting between different clean energy technologies (storage, nuclear, renewables) needs to stop.
So when we really need a "green" party they're filled with zealots who're unable see the harm reduction tradeoffs that needs to be done.
But I have never heard any nuclear advocate give them any credit for this. It required a fair bit of political capital, given then (then) recent meltdown at Fukushima. Maybe a little less complaining about 'green zealots' and a little more humility about nuclear's negative externalities would improve cooperation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
The US 2 party system makes the US one mostly irrelevant.
But in countries like Germany and Sweden where more parties are in parliament, they have over time had the chance to apply influence over time to the extent where nuclear power is really on it's last straws despite the only reasonable replacement during winters is fossil fuels.
https://www.gp.org/green_new_deal (US) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_90/The_Greens#Energy_... (Germany) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Party_(Sweden)
I was clearly referring to the likes of the actual US Green party I linked previously for whose the US presidential election candidate was Howie Hawkins that has an explicit policy document stating that Nuclear power should be abolished (no idea what the democratic "green new deal" includes but it's hopefully less nutters).
Harrisburg was quite important global factor in most of these parties history worldwide in the sense that the accident was the spark that bought early technohostile environmentalists into action to create these parties in the years following the accident.
You can find a list of the parties since they seem to have global cooperation organisation (the map on the page also shows where they are in parliament)
Nuclear PR is top notch. It's because it's 2-3x the cost of other renewables.
In most other fields that would put it out of the running entirely.
Better storage would be nice but for now at least, every MWh generated by solar and wind is a MWh not generated by a gas fired power plant.
The reason it doesn't get an even harder time than it already does is because nuclear powers like the US and UK like to keep reactors and know how close at hand for military purposes.
People won't say this out loud, however. It's all about fixing global warming any way we can all the way. "Why not use a mix of sources?"
The messaging only does a 180 when it's a designated enemy trying to build a nuclear power station. Then the default assumption is that it's a cover for building out military capabilities.
This is mainly why the UK agreed to pay an inflation adjusted £93 per MwH for non dispatchable nuclear power in 5 years and £33-40 for solar/wind now. The ability to threaten nuclear annihilation matters to many governments, and nuclear reactors are useful to have around for that purpose.
Civilian power reactors themselves are of limited value for military purposes, particularly light water moderated ones. It's certainly true that maintaining a nuclear industry and the technical and operational knowledge is cross subsidised from civilian power generation.
> non dispatchable nuclear power
What definition are you using for dispatchable here? Because in my understanding nuclear power is generally considered dispatchable power generation.
The kind used in nuclear submarines?
>It's certainly true that maintaining a nuclear industry and the technical and operational knowledge is cross subsidised
It's the main reason nuclear reactors exist at all, and why theyre predominantly built by countries with nuclear arsenals or aspirations.
They've never been particularly cheap, and while they haven't gone up in cost, they're relatively more expensive than theyve ever been. This is why public support is even more critical for their survival, which is why there's about 1 pro nuclear propaganda article per week popping to the top of hacker news each week. The military industrial complex is spooked.
>What definition are you using for dispatchable here?
It takes hours to scale up production of a nuclear plant and seconds for a gas fired plant:
From your link "Although theoretically dispatchable, coal and nuclear thermal plants are designed to run as base load power plants".
Dispatchable means the power is available when it is needed. Not when it is available i.e. when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.
Modern nuclear reactors incorporate grey rods which allow them to be used in a limited load following capacity.
Unlike gas.
Does a business that delivers a meal to you only with 24 hours notice count as a restaurant? Theoretically yes.
In reality, power coming from nuclear power plants is very predictable, this makes it easy to incorporate into the grid energy mix. Nuclear power has many problems but this isn't one.
Cost should always be a consideration, but when people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid and it isn't clear what they are really trying to accomplish.
The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is about as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates and they continue to support subsidizing it. The potential costs for renewables + storage is about the cost of nuclear, but that cost also doesn't matter to some advocates. (If grid storage was cheap, we would have built it decades ago.)
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Some advocates recommend massively overbuilding solar or wind to deal with seasonal differences. This is obviously at least a cost multiplier but that doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.
Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap, simple or easy to protect against terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amigas super station hasn’t been completed yet. The potential costs here don't seem to matter to some advocates.
Advocates for renewables seem happy with relying on natural gas peaker plants where necessary to get around the costs of building grid storage, but methane is a very potent GHG in the short term. There are lots of methane losses in its capture and distribution. No one concerned about climate change seriously thinks that burning natural gas is a long term answer.
It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. If you were forced to choose, would you prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
Or maybe they care enough about climate change to not make another long-term mistake out as the solution, only to then have to repeat a very similar situation a few decades from now.
Increase the use of fission reactors and you will also increase the frequency of catastrophic events, it will increase the production of waste we still have no real way to reliably deal with, very comparable to the emissions we pumped in the atmosphere because "whatever could go wrong with that". We've been handling nuclear in a similar irresponsible short-sighted way for way too long [0].
So while fission might be a tempting solution to the climate change problem, it also has very real potential to become the very next problem we burden future generations with.
Is exchanging one long-term debt for another really that useful of a solution, or shouldn't we rather look for actually innovative and sustainable solutions?
What is your idea of a "real way to reliably deal with waste"? Waste in general is stored or burned all over the world. Nuclear waste is best stored, at NPPs or at dedicated sites. Which is already done since the beginning. It is a non problem.
I'm pretty sure if there was enough desire for nuclear from politicians and commercial interests, the public could be convinced.
I think we should support nuclear. But my biggest reasons for being negative towards a big push for nuclear, is that nuclear doesn't really solve our problems. It only solves part of the grid electricity problem, and probably only for major industrial countries. We still need massive improvements in energy storage solutions and renewable hydrogen/ammonia/synfuel production for transportation, industry and farming. If you solve those problems, you've also solved energy balancing of renewables. Since renewables seems to be scaling faster, the logical answer is to focus 95% of efforts on renewables and energy storage/conversion. Keep nuclear R&D at a low but sustainable level. Then we can start to convert some of the wind/solar farms to nuclear down the line. Hopefully with small modular reactors that'd be easier to mass-produce.
That is, if you assume we'll need nuclear power, you're basically assuming we're not going to solve the climate crisis.
But seriously, don't shut down existing nuclear reactors unless it's absolutely necessary. That's just dumb.
> That is, if you assume we'll need nuclear power, you're basically assuming we're not going to solve the climate crisis.
How on earth does this make sense? The country that has come closest to solving the climate crisis (France) is heavily nuclear. Their carbon intensity of electricity is 1/7th that of Germany.
Another claim I see regularly: Angela Merkel decided on the German nuclear exit as a response to Fukushima and she permanently shut down all reactors.
When in reality Merkel tried to draw out and prolong a nuclear exit that was already decided and ratified in the early 2000s and Germany still has fission reactors running to this day.
Surely there's a more respectful way to criticize the idea.
I don't know, he didn't call the person who had the idea stupid, he called the idea itself stupid. Sure, it's harsh, but so what? The idea isn't going to get offended.
To add fuel to the off-topic grammar pedantry fire: "Stupidly phrased" applies "stupid" to the phraser, not the phrasee. So no, you did in fact call them stupid, not their comment.
I mean, fine, if we're going to be grammar nerds, let's do it. "Stupidly" is an adverb. It applies to the act of phrasing not the subject doing that verb. At the moment that the person was doing the phrasing, they were doing something in a stupid manner, but that doesn't necessarily imply that they are themselves generally stupid.
For example, I can "randomly choose a card from a deck." That doesn't imply that I'm a particularly random person.
Think of it this way, this has no practical implementation and does not solve the engineering problems we have right now but it might lead to a different yet related discovery down the line which we will solve a different problem in 10-20 years. Yes for us engineer this seems like a pointless (very stupid!) endeavour, but in practice that's just how research works. Scientist will explore ideas that are not necessarily feasible or useful and create building blocks for future research.
Not everyone in energy storage has to work on designing new alloys for anodes and cathodes otherwise we'd stagnate. We need the fringe and very stupid ideas as well.
I'm not familiar with this specific instance but GP's point is exactly the sort of technical oversight or omission I'd expect.
Maybe same OP is tired of imposter-type execs here on HN being super-positive about media-regurtitated ideas and bombastic headlines, so he opened a troll account where he doesn't need to be all appologetic and polite and just tell it like it is.
A quick search reveals no mention of CO2 Poisoning for hydrogen fuel-cells, but a majority mention of carbon monoxide poisoning. An additional search reveals catalysts that rectify this issue as early as 2005.
It’s going to be a lie mix of many of these promising ideas, blended in such a way that is, hopefully, not too expensive, not too insecure, not dirty in a new way, and not not at least a little bit fun.
As Sahara PV is still on the northern hemisphere this would not solve the problem the study tries to tackle.
Roughly 360 hours of sunshine or a bit more in the summer, 290 hours in winter months [1], so about 80% of max.
If we look at direct normal irradiance instead, a more appropriate metric, it varies between 7.93 kWh/m^2/day in June vs. 5.51 kWh/m^2/day in December [2], so about 70% of max.
Hour-to-hour and day-to-day fluctuations are another thing altogether, and higher demand in winter (e.g. for heating) yet another consideration, but if we're purely interested in some sort of "seasonal correction" I guess you'd want to overbuild by 40% or a bit less if you set the angle of the panels in such a way as to optimize winter production at the expense of summer production, a common strategy.
The closer you get to the equator, the less it matters whether you're in the northern hemisphere or the southern hemisphere. Aswan is at 24°N, a latitude at which you can still find a lot of smaller cities, but as you go to the south of that, infrastructure disappears and it might not be economical to build PV or solar thermal installations in the absolute middle of nowhere. Seems to be about the latitude to which DESERTEC proposes to lay HDVC connections.
Not an expert though, just someone who can look up some numbers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aswan
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-Direct-normal-ir...
Build them all in a large strip, side by side. Attach a blower on rails at the top. Done.
C'mon this isn't rocket science.
How is this an improvement again?
https://theconversation.com/solar-panels-in-sahara-could-boo...
The lengths of bizarre ideas people are coming up with just so they can avoid nuclear power seriously have no end.
Lots of energy in Europe is supplied from countries you may not want to be reliant on (Russian gas for example).
For me people seem to have an either or opinion - we should build renewables or nuclear or whatever (I don’t think this is your stance though).
Reality is that we should be deploying none CO2 producing energy as quickly as possible, and if that means building solar / wind farms then build them, if we can build nuclear then build it.
Hopefully politics will enable future low risk low waste etc nuclear to thrive.
I agree it is up to European countries to do what they want.
The lengths of bizzare ideas people go through to not help their close neighbours, so that they can avoid facing the injustices of the past have no end.
Maybe not a great idea to setup infrastructure that is core to your country.
Just look at Russia and German gas imports to see how this plays out.
The US is the worlds Hard SuperPower, europe is the worlds Soft SuperPower.
You'd pre pretty resentfull too btw, if your continent had been carved up by a foreign power with complete disregard for your cultural borders, extracted your resources and the discarded you in a state of chaos.
The african people can't be that hatefull if they try to escape their impoverished conditions by seeking an education and better life in europe.
The european people have a historical responsibility to right the wrongs their ancestors did to the ancestors of the people of africa.
A inter-continental power grid and energy collaboration is a win win for everybody.
That's not how this worked out in the last 20 years of negotiations;
> You'd pre pretty resentfull too btw, if your continent had been carved up by a foreign power with complete disregard for your cultural borders, extracted your resources and the discarded you in a state of chaos.
Agreed, but that just validates the fact that it wouldn't be a good idea to put critical infrastructure in a country that resents you.
> The african people can't be that hatefull if they try to escape their impoverished conditions by seeking an education and better life in europe.
Right, because they individually gain something out of it.
> The european people have a historical responsibility to right the wrongs their ancestors did to the ancestors of the people of africa.
Do African people have a historical responsibility for the wrongs done by Algerian piracy or for destroying each other's empires?
> A inter-continental power grid and energy collaboration is a win win for everybody.
It's really not when the most basic things already don't work in said countries. You can see the European CoVid-19 help to Tanzania for a little sneak preview.
Is that true? It's not hard to think of energy poor countries that are poor or energy rich ones that are poor. Stability is an ambiguous thing but it seems like it's easier to make the the argument that stability causes wealth or instability causes poverty then the opposite.
That fact alone that nuclear power is so much more expensive compared especially to renewables is it's last nail in the coffin.
Edit: fixed idiom, thanks raverbashing
Europe and the N.America are 34% of the entire electricity consumption. Even If they miraculously reduced their carbon pollution to zero not only would 2/3 of the problem remain, but - and here is the kicker - the growth in consumption is coming from the poor and poorest countries with enormous populations.
They are going to use the cheapest energy available: brown coal.
Its not a simple simple cost argument: we have to find a scalable, safe, clean, base-load source of energy that is cheaper than coal.
And then give it away.
The only possibility is nuclear fission - preferably not one that boils water in a pressure cooker.
The same is true for your scenario, though: Why should the rich countries export one of the most expensive energy sources to the poor countries, when e.g. onshore wind is right now already on par with brown coal?[0]
[0] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p... page 2
LCOE isn't a very thorough standard which you quickly realize once you dig into it.
Furthermore renewables are unreliable and thus require backup energy from reliable sources such as coal, oil, gas or nuclear. Because renewables are forced into use when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, they basically make the reliable sources more expensive.
I could go on with all sorts of ways this provides a completely skewed comparison structure.
Comparing the cost of nuclear vs. and wind and solar is like comparing the cost of construction and upkeep of a Boing 747 and a Cessna based on their ability to fly.
All of these, including decomission, are part of the LCOE formula, just as they are for renewables or coal or gas: https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/e049...
That problem with renewables can easily be fixed with storage, which can be batteries, generating green hydrogen trough electrolysis or a number of many other ways.
While on summer days where a lot of sun shines nuclear reactors have their very own problem: They produce too much heat and need to be throttled/shut down [0] [1] or else they would start heating up their cooling medium too much, which are usually nearby waterbodies/river systems.
With global warming being a thing, we can expect this problem to occur much more frequently, and even more so if we decided to build even more reactors.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-nucle...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Coal $112/MWh vs. utility solar $48/MWh.
I wouldn't underestimate the appeal renewables have in terms of "we get free energy as long as we can keep the facility running" if you don't have much money. It's a rather "obvious" investment.
Here are some of the very valid questions a poor country would have to ask.
“Do we really want America’s unreliable foreign policy to effectively control our ability to generate electricity? What if we piss off the wrong diplomat, hire the wrong leader, or if our people believe in the wrong god? What if they decide to destroy our economy via embargoes? Where will we get our fissionable materials? Will they pull a stuxnet on us ? Will they assassinate our top nuclear engineers?”
Unless of course a military coup happens and contracts are nullified, or riots, or conflict or etc..
And even worse, how can you ensure someone will be around willing to put in the effort to safely decommission something that has no more value? Even in the most developed and stable nations this is and will be a challenge. Who wants to put in the effort to clean up the previous generations mess.
The economics of electricity generation have been transformed in the last couple of years - for example, the LCOE from on-shore wind and solar has dropped 80-90% in less than 10 years. Prices for renewables and even grid-scale batteries are falling so fast that you cannot even trust financial analysis of electricity generation from a year ago.
Burning coal is now 2 to 3 times as expensive as on-shore wind, for example. Nuclear is over times as expensive. Where governments aren't forcing the market to use coal, nobody is building new coal generators.
This price shift has had a very visible effect on coal generation for example - you can see it in graphs of global electricity sources - after a long period of growth, coal generation (as a share of the total) has been dropping since 2013.
The fact that wind and solar are not dispatchable unlike coal and nuclear turns out to not actually be a deal-breaking problem for expanding renewable generation considerably.
Quite a few European countries which now generate nearly 50% of their electricity through renewables. None have grid-scale batteries and many don't have nuclear. As a whole Europe gets about a third of their electricity from renewables. And even the US is at about 20-25%?
You can achieve these sort of percentages with a low-tech approach. You over-provision wind/solar generation and use derating in the case of wind to cut generation if demand is very low. This is feasible because of the cheapness of these power sources.
In tandem with NG peaker plants and a small amount of storage (hydro and some batteries for stabilization) and/or interconnectors, we have seen countries achieved 40%+ renewable electricity without any effect on the reliability of domestic supply. This share is still rising, so the limits of this approach are not yet apparent.
There are projects of cheaper nuclear power plants, which I agree is the main issue. You have to put 10, 15 years into building this massive thing instead of doing modular, smaller projects.
Obviously costs come down when you start mass producing things, which we've done with solar but have not even really tried to do with nuclear.
It doesn't matter anyway: Only what is, not what could have been will have an impact on the decision makers.
For costs to go down on nuclear, you need to stop building giant one-off projects which are bespoke down to the rivets. It's like expecting a hand-made suit to ever be price-competitive with something you buy off the rack at Brooks Brothers.
> It doesn't matter anyway
Luckily, it's not what could have been because unlike the cynics on HN, some[1] people[2] are actually having a go at solving this problem.
Maybe small modular reactors will do better. That would be great! But at this point I'll believe cost/schedule numbers only after a new reactor enters commercial operation. The numerous reactors that exist only in PowerPoint form belong in the same bin as the Battery Breakthrough of the Week.
Did you want to wait for Solar to be price-competitive with gas before we started using it? That doesn't make any sense. The reason solar is so competitive these days is because we invested massively while it was still expensive. This has not happened with nuclear in its entire history, because we lack the political will (mostly thanks to anti-nuclear FUDders) to do so.
The AP1000 units under construction at Vogtle started construction in 2013. That was 56 years after Shippingport Atomic Power Station and Vallecitos Nuclear Center started operation in Pennsylvania and California.
As of February 2013, the 2 AP1000 units at Vogtle were supposed to cost $15.3 billion. As of December 2017 the estimate had increased to $23 billion. The big mystery is why the costs were so badly under-estimated only 4 years earlier. Construction started after Three Mile Island, after Chernobyl, after Fukushima, after 50+ years of commercial power reactors in the US, and after regulatory requirements had changed to address prior nuclear incidents. The initial cost estimate should have accounted for all those factors. Will the next nuclear project account for them better?
"How the Vogtle Nuclear Expansion’s Costs Escalated"
https://www.powermag.com/how-the-vogtle-nuclear-expansions-c...
[1] Summing column "Reference unit power" from IAEA Power Reactor Information System https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat...
Iterate on nuclear like we have with basically everything else and I guarantee the prices come down significantly. Why do I know this? Because this is what has happened every time we have iterated on anything in human history. Nuclear is not the magical exception to this rule, it's just harder to iterate on because the initial investment is so high.
https://www.nuscalepower.com/about-us
A big wind turbine generates up to 6 megawatts [1]. A big solar panel generates up to 0.00067 megawatts [2]. If nuclear reactors can't progress much faster per iteration, that's another way to say that they won't catch up at all.
[1] https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-wind/...
[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/11/trina-launches-670-w-...
If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better
https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
> c) the Swiss population voted against new nuclear plants in 2017, so this topic is moot anyway.
This topic is not moot. This is the only realistic way to save humanity from the climate catastrophe, even if there are many fear mongers.
that can change if big governments focus on that
> potentially dangerous
the safest energy production per kWh hands down
> radioactive waste we have no way of dealing with
not true, we deal with it since 40's and we are doing fine.
In that context, nuclear has very much seen way more focus and support than probably any other modern form of energy generation.
So, why didn't that pan out and we apparently need another round of "big government focus"?
The focus is needed to double down to get rid of all coal/gas plants.
Assuming no electricity theft, high transmission powerline losses range between 0.5% - 1.1% per 160 km [1], and losses are generally higher on hotter days, leaving us with a probable loss of between 20% - 35%.
I've argued this before, but I would rather avoid unproven storage concepts entirely and fasttrack nuclear reactors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission?wp...
I have no idea what HVDC underwater cables cost, their maximum voltage, nor their losses, so let’s go with your original figures, and the worst case: 35% losses.
The average of the BNEF 2021, Lazard 2020, and IRENA 2020 studies says that utility scale solar costs $48/MWh while nuclear costs $164/MWh:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
35% loss would make that $73.8/MWh.
At these distances I must assume the grid itself is a non-trivial cost, and estimating that cost certainly deserves a lot more careful thought than I can put into one comment, but that grid would have to cost effectively more than $90/MWh to be worse than nuclear.
Next, nuclear is expensive because the economies of scale are basically zero. Make a nuclear power plant factory and you can get those numbers way down.
Finally, cost probably isn't the right way to look at it. The issue at hand is mostly efficiency, where obviously the nuclear option wins handily.
Except we’ve never done that so we don’t know how big a scale we’d need to get costs down. In the absence of evidence, it’s entirely conceivable there isn’t enough economically recoverable uranium in the world for mass production of reactors to be cost effective.
Therefore the only cost estimate we can rely on is what we have actually managed thus far.
> Finally, cost probably isn't the right way to look at it. The issue at hand is mostly efficiency, where obviously the nuclear option wins handily.
I disagree with both of these claims. For the first: for most of my life, the argument against green power, the reason nothing changed, was always the cost. Make the solution cheap and the problem goes away all by itself.
For the second: so long as it is energy positive (EROI>>1, true for both), and the cost per unit is low (which you’re already dismissing), and you’re not resource constrained (we aren’t), I can’t see what other measure of efficiency matters much. The light-flux to electricity conversion efficiency? No more important than thermodynamic limits in a reactor heat engine. Resistive losses in transmission? I’ve just demonstrated that is irrelevant.
If we also made the energy storage cheap then you would be right. But it's not cheap.
For some models showing these scenarios, see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006
It still worked out in favour of PV, even without the suggestion — up in this thread — of connecting to the longer sunlight hours of the Sahara, which reduces need due to each of latitude, covering multiple time zones, and reduced cloud cover.
However, that's not the biggest problem, current world wide lithium battery production is around 300GWh per year. Typical demand in the UK is around 30GW, even your 16 hours is around 1.5x the current battery manufacturing capabilities. You'd be competing against every car, laptop, tablet and phone manufacturer for that capacity.
Also, the cost of grid storage batteries is dominated by the short lifespan rather than by the number of days or hours it can replace supply. If the battery is enough for a week of zero power from all sources in your entire grid, the wear from normal use takes longer to become a significant cost.
Vehicle to grid is interesting but the number of chargers which currently support it very low. It requires a non-trivial amount of infrastructure to invert high voltage DC from the battery back back to a grid synchronous AC signal. In addition to the extra wear on the battery it's had to see how this would be good value while being acceptable to consumers. In some respects recycling of batteries after their service life in a car is a more interesting scenario for grid storage.
Increasing capacity leads to efficiency which leads to the price going doing. Except when the demand is outstripping supply.
Which of us right? I guess we can agree to meet up in 20 years and find out.
That said, grid batteries should ideally be using different chemistry to handle the increased charge/discharge cycling.
I completely agree with this. It would actually be quite unusual if the same solution fit such different problem domains. Energy density by weight is an (almost) non issue in fixed installations, by volume only slightly more important. Lifetime cost and maintenance requirements as by far the largest issue.
At the moment it feels like the stage in the 60s where people thought turbines were interesting so tried to cram them into cars, trucks and trains. Except here we are trying to wire together millions of tiny lithium cells to get enough energy to power a country.
Likewise. It currently seems to me that the same chemistries are being used for both simply because the cost reduction due to mass production for cars has made it the current cheapest option, but I don’t expect that to be true forever.
Solar is stupid cheap, just build more is a perfectly viable option. To put things into perspective the fuel cost alone on gas turbines is twice what solar cost. Which means if 50% of all solar energy generated is absolutely useless, it’s still dramatically cheaper than natural gas, which is it’s self dramatically cheaper than coal, and coal is dramatically cheaper than unsubsidized nuclear.
Model enough hydro, wind, and solar to provide sufficient power 99% of the time and even on days that fail the failure is minimal. Further, batteries don’t like to be deep discharged, so a price optimized 16 hour reserve includes a more expensive reserve which would require a week of 1% days to eat into. Except on that timescale demand is somewhat flexible which solves the problem.
We already have >10GWh of pumped hydro storage (most of which at Dinorwig Power Station) which is required to balance a grid with a mixture of Gas, Nuclear and Wind power.
That said the southern tip of England is noticeably better than London. So, having some minimal local production is viable.
Large scale wind production? Maybe, but it's still less than the nuclear component.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...
Nuclear power in the United Kingdom provides 20% of the country's domestic production, as of 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ki...
That said, 5% of it’s power comes from that undersea cable, and France is Heavily nuclear so it arguably swaps back to Nuclear.
Why is it needed?
My first comment in this thread is in the context of putting the PV in the Sahara desert.
Correct. And we've managed to bring the cost of nuclear down to 1-2 billion dollars per GW when building plants at scale [1]. This was done during the late 60s and early 70s when we built lots of nuclear plants at once [2].
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
2. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...
Your first link. Second link is invalid for me.
That was actually the official outlook of the US Atomic Energy Commission back in the early 1960: They feared the advent of the nuclear age would see world uranium supplies rapidly exhausted.
This potential outlook is what triggered research into early attempts at thorium fuel cycles [0]
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2014/05/thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that...
Dig down into the numbers and a 50% drop in construction costs wouldn’t make unsubsidized nuclear even close to cost competitive with unsubsidized wind or solar.
You can get actual construction costs for comparison from various sources like Wikipedia. More recent US numbers are inflated due to the age of these reactors, but looking at costs over time shows they where never cheap to operate.
Excluding Watts Bar which is a very odd situation: The plant, construction of which began in 1973, has two Westinghouse pressurized water reactor units: Unit 1, completed in 1996, and Unit 2, completed in 2015. Unit 1 has a winter net dependable generating capacity of 1,167 megawatts. Unit 2 has a capacity of 1,165 megawatts. Both units are the newest operating civilian reactors to come online in the United States, and Unit 2 is the first and only new reactor to enter service in the 21st century in the US as of 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Bar_Nuclear_Plant
Their lifetime capacity factor is also 73.45% which makes generalizing based on them a poor choice.
That's exactly what modern nuclear proposals look like. You make a nuclear power plant factory, mass-produce smallish mostly-sealed reactor units of a few hundred megawatts each, truck a few of the units to a power plant for installation, and truck them back to the factory occasionally for service.
Look at what the DoE has to say about things like "Advanced Small Modular Reactors". Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/floating-nuclear-powe...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0awiL0BeZ-k
https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...
There's a big cluster of plants built for 1-2 billion per GW during the late 60s and early 70s. That's nuclear's economy of scale.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
(Naturally this means I think the growth seen since 1992 won’t last until 2030, but the point remains)
Your link appears to show cost going up since ‘65, not down.
Meanwhile the prices people are quoting for solar are with massive economies of scale at this point.
We need economies of scale, and I'm not talking about 1970s scale, I'm talking about scale.
1970s scales work fine. It was built at a cost of 1-2 billion dollars per GW, which is very competitive versus solar and wind + storage.
Maybe you misunderstood and thought I was saying that you can't have economies of scale with nuclear? If so, that is pretty much the opposite of my intended meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
https://asian-power.com/power-utility/news/chinas-thermal-co...
Discussion last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26385374 (455 comments)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid
Pretty sure it’s very much a concept only at this stage
It’s closer and Spain is part of the EU and politically stable.
Yet more options are the Danish artificial island for distributing wind power and the UK huge offshore wind projects. All these are possible with today's tech and could dramatically reduce the need for batteries while still getting to net zero.
The Sahara idea is a non-starter due to geopolitical risks, no way the EU would agree to having critical infrastructure coming from North Africa.
There was a discussion recently on the EU supergrid[2]. If politicians were serious about solving the climate crisis we'd already be building out all this infrastructure instead of everyone wringing their hands about the cost. And meanwhile the likes of Nordstream2 is powering ahead.
While you cry about environmental impact of burning Russian natural gas (even though Nord Stream 2 physically can not increase its export to the EU by more than 10% and probably will be used to simply re-route existing supplies from middle-man countries like Poland and Ukraine), the likes of Poland generate 70% of their electricity from coal. But, hey, they don't pay to Russia so it's fine!
Until we will have a viable geography-independent solution for grid-level energy storage (which ideally should be able to store several days worth of consumption), massive renewables (aprox. more than 20-30% of a total generation capacity) always will be backed by fossil plants. Well, unless of course you want for blackouts to become a common occurrence. If you indeed care about ecology and climate, then the choice between coal and natural gas should be obvious.
Also don't forget: The Sahara is in a worl region where plenty of people don't have an electricity grid yet. So yes, by all means, build solar power there, but a significant share of it needs to be provided to the people living there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrifi...
Classic deserts aren't the best place for solar. They may be sunny but wind-blown dust covers panels. Sand+wind etches glass. And heat reduces PV efficiency. A better option might actually be the high north. It gets plenty of sun for at least half the year and when it isn't getting sun it is getting wind.
https://thenextweb.com/science/2021/03/02/solar-panels-in-th...
only a fraction (around 15%) of that incoming energy gets converted to electricity
Your point remains however: Desert solar-power is a different beast than normal solar-power. PV won't work well in a desert, you need to change your methodology entirely.
A "Solar tower" consists of a tower (which is just a standard thermal power-plant: usually a steam engine), and a ton of mirrors that heats the tower to 500C. The hotter the environment, the better a solar tower design gets.
In contrast: PVs get worse-and-worse the hotter they get. Hot solar panels mean that the silicon resistance goes up and up.
IIRC, someone (I think IBM) did "solve" some "PVs in the desert" issue by running cold water to cool down the panels so that PV-efficiency can go back up. (Where "solve" was some experimental plant I remember hearing in the news years ago...) That's the kind of thing you need to do to get good energy from PVs in a desert environment.
------------
So for any hot and dry environment, it just sorta pushes the design towards thermal plants, and away from PVs. PVs are really good in temperate conditions however (where natural wind is good enough to cool off the panels). Just different technologies for different ecologies.
Cheaper to throw in a bunch of panels and replace them after they are scratched by the sand, that to build expensive panels.
Automation can be the solution for solar farms in the deserts. Daily automated cleaning, compressed air hosing, etc can be built into the project.
Its cheaper to replace a mirror than to replace a PV panel.
The main benefit to solar-thermal is that they're innately offset from the sun by a few hours. In the morning, it takes a few hours to heat up, and then after the sun sets, it takes a few hours to cool down.
During that offset period, the plant continues to generate power. Generating power at 9pm from thermal-residue (at the cost of losing 9am performance) is an acceptable tradeoff, especially when you consider that thermal plants work as a "team" with normal PV panels.
Normal PV panels cannot give 9pm or 10pm power, not without an expensive battery bank (which suddenly makes thermal solar towers cost effective).
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Moving forward: the problem isn't going to be megawatts... its going to be megawatts AT THE APPROPRIATE TIME.
That 7pm to 12pm power is currently served by Natural Gas peaker plants, and will continue to be served by peaker plants for the foreseeable future. After that point, the wind picks up and Wind Energy + Baseload (aka: Nuclear) takes over for the rest of the night.
I know there's a group who believe that solar + batteries can solve the 7pm to 12pm power problem. But I believe that specifically discovering generators for that timeframe (ex: thermal solar towers) would be a superior option compared to giant battery banks.
CMIIW, but aren't "standard thermal power-plants" (especially those involving steam) usually reliant on a steady supply of (cold) water? That would seem like a major dealbreaker in a desert...
Yes: you need to cool the water down to increase the efficiency of a steam engine / traditional thermal power plant. For many plants, this is a supply of fresh water.
No: A desert environment is obviously hostile to fresh water (like a stream). As such, "cooling the water" is solved through other means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
In the case of Ivanpah Solar Power (the first Thermal Solar Plant that popped up in my search), they air-cool the water in a closed system. It won't get as cold as stream-water, but it still gets cold-enough that they can recycle / extract energy out of the steam engine system they use.
[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/gas-grid-operat...
Musk claimed the entire US could be run on solar power with a 100 square mile (258 km2) patch of land - that's smaller than Malta. Batteries to ensure a continuous supply would need 1 square mile.
Another reason I think about this for infrastructure projects is, well, America is terrible about maintaining its infrastructure. It's a bit like code -- don't be surprised if that thing you banged out has to be viable for a decade more than you anticipated. And no battery tech stands up to decades of wear and tear like nickel-iron. I just know that any fancy battery stack we want to offset wind or solar will suffer from neglect as the people writing the budgets turn their eyes to shiny new things. Might as well plan for it.
That's not too terrible I suppose, plus aluminium is rather convenient to store.
Each year the people of this planet mine 160 million metric tons of Bauxite [2]. Not sure how the Bauxite ore related in weight to the final product.
Maybe this could be a viable option for some energy storage?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/464187/households-by-siz...
[2] https://www.aluminum.org/industries/production/bauxite#:~:te....
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_primary_a...
[brit walks up] I'm looking for aluminium please. Do you have any?
[hawker] Sorry can't help
6) Broader context with a few illustrative examples
I provided a scheme showing the requirements and possible consequences of econokmically feasible large-scale electricity storage in publicly available application OrgPad.
The scheme is directly accessible under link
https://orgpad.com/s/5BfLP-cxj-7
A few technical instructions (which might be useful if you will use OrgPad for the first time):
Mouse click-and-draw serves for moving the entire canvas, mouse wheel for zooming the entire picture, cells having a fine shadow have a hidden content which can be opened by mouse click on the respective cell. The application does work in modern web browsers like Chrome, Chromium, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, not (or only very poorly) in IE.
7) Conclusion
The crucial question is why the relevant laboratory and technical records pertaining to this potentially game-changing invention quietly sleep in Lockheed archives. Myself, I have not a capacity to test a model device in laboratory, nor find out what Lockheed exactly tested and with which outcome.
Should any of the readers, however, have such opportunity, I believe that clarifying the crucial question (whether or not Geisler’s device might have indeed worked) might be worth of the respective effort.
Thank you very much for your patience.
"Pullout" might not be the right name. Preamble? Sidebar (up top)? The bullet list is not quite an Abstract. Maybe just Bullet List?
The reactions that require the higher temperatures would need to be industrial (and don't seem to be more beneficial than other methods).
So what are the benefits?
Consumable electrodes are actually doing chemical work in the aluminum. It’s not just wear from use. To produce 78 grams of Aluminum directly requires 48 grams of Carbon electrodes (using made by graphitizing some tar or coke) which oxidizes to 176 grams of CO2. Aluminum is 31MJ/kg specific energy. Assuming 70% efficiency conversion from aluminum to hydrogen and 70% from hydrogen to electricity (both fairly optimistic figures), you’re talking about 535 grams of emitted CO2 for each kWh of electricity out. Ignoring the electricity input, inefficiencies and losses in making the aluminum, and assuming perfect conversion of the tar to electrodes. Worse than a good, advanced combined cycle natural gas plant (which can get as good as roughly 350 grams per kWh for record efficiency plants).
I just don’t see how this is gonna be a net win without carbonfree electrodes. It seems just about impossible here. Storing hydrogen directly looks to make way more sense.
And?
What's the benefit? We could store energy in concrete if using gravity or use water to produce the hydrogen for the fuel cell.
The benefit is you can store energy, in aluminum. It has a high energy density, you can safely store it anywhere, it requires no containment at all, etc.
Your last statement includes the answer to your own question. They are using the hydrogen, from water reacting with aluminum, to power a fuel cell.
Elemental aluminum will react spontaneously, at room temperature, with water; liberating hydrogen gas. The reaction is exothermic generating a lot of heat. Both the hydrogen and heat can be used for energy. Heat for heating the home in winter and the hydrogen gas for fuel cells and accessory power.
The reaction needs nothing more than a reaction vessel to hold moderate pressure. A simple stainless vessel would work. The pressure being whatever you want to store your hydrogen at. More than likely, though, you would just go ahead and convert it to electricity with a fuel cell, in which case you don't need to store it.
Aluminum can be stored in blocks, outside. I envisage some northern resident walking outside on a brisk morning with a hack saw and removing a chunk of aluminum to throw in his 'furnace' (reaction vessel) to warm his house and charge his phone, etc. Afterwards you need to drain off the water and collect the alumina/aluminum hydroxide and toss it in the recycling bin.
Aluminum is basically free to store as energy. It requires no maintenance, no upkeep, doesn't degrade appreciably, easily transported. Hell you could build your house out of it. It's akin to wood.
Use cases: Remote residences in the winter. i.e. solar is garbage and no one is shipping you a nuclear reactor.
1) Aluminum as a high energy density storage medium
The authors of the disputed article have the same point as many contributors herein – that a cheap, economically feasible energy storage may be the crucial „missing link“ between electricity from renewable energy sources and a more sustainable „carbon neutral“ economy. Indeed, with respect to energy density – which may be roughly taken as an estimate for the costs of energy storage in the chosen medium – aluminum looks pretty favourable. Please note that the volumetric energy density value given in the disputed article for hydrogen pertains to liquid hydrogen which is the most dense practically applicable form of elemental hydrogen at normal pressure. Obviously the vessels for reliable storage of cryogenic liquid hydrogen are more expensive than (pretty expensive) pressure vessels chosen as a more feasible technical solution by automobile manufacturers developing hydrogen cars. Therein, volumetric density slightly above 1 kWh/L is a current standard with hydrogen pressurized to 70 MPa (700 bars).
2) Energy losses from irreversibilities in energy storage and/or recovery
High level of reversibility in the respective energy storage and recovery is the main advantage of batteries. Unfortunately, there is at least one fundamental reason for which critical disadvantage of batteries - high price for a unit capacity – is basically incurrable even with cheapest materials.
This fundamental reason is the ratio between volume and mass of the electrochemically active materials which can be put into a reasonably operable battery on one hand and the overall volume and mass of all other parts necessary for this reasonable function. This unfavourable ratio can significantly, in several orders of magnitude, improve in „flow“ batteries, and even more if we split the function of the flow battery into a separate electrolyzer designed solely for „charging“ our storage system and a separate fuel cells designed solely for „discharging“ (electricity recovery from the storage system).
Unfortunately, the only electrochemically active medium that is more-less applicable in such „ideal“ electricity storage systems (that enable both high capacity and high storage efficiency by combining the high efficiency of direct electrochemical energy conversion with high energy density of a neat „fuel“ used as the energy storage medium), is still hydrogen – which, however, suffers from the costly storage due to low volumetric energy density in comparison with conventional fuels. As soon as we try to improve hydrogen energy density by converting it chemically into a form which is more favourable form the viewpoint of the cheap storage and transport (e.g. into liquid ammonia having energy density above 4 kWh/L, or, by carbon dioxide reduction, into carbon-based synthetic fuels), we will necesarily lose a significant part of the energy originally conserved in hydrogen, as a Gibbs energy of the respective reaction dissipated on the expense of a thermodynamically „spontaneous“ chemical conversion.
For example, by simple hydrogen conversion into ammonia by its reaction with atmospheric nitrogen that is achievable on an industrial scale by well-known Haber-Bosch process, you unavoidably lose about 30 % of the renewable electricity which you originally conserved in the „green“ hydrogen. Very similar numbers apply for carbon dioxide conversion into synthetic methane by well-known Sabbatier process, and you can take as a rule of thumb that the more complicated conversion, the more of the originally conserved energy you have to sacrifice.
Even worse, none of the synthetic fuels currently considered for large scale energy storage can even approach hydrogen in technical maturity of its direct electrochemical re-conversion into electricity. For example, known ammonia fuel cells are still at least order of magitude worse in their performance than hydrogen fuel cells. And, to my best knowledge, reliable and highly efficient hydrogen fuel cells are - after decades of development - still impossible without use of precious and therefore pretty expensive platinum metals.
Finally, as soon as you resort to simply burning your synthetic fuel in an internal combustion engine or any similar equipment, the efficiency of electricity recovery from the respective fuel drops to some 40 %.
The second part will follow.
3) Consequences for the economical feasibility of renewables if supported by currently considered power-to-fuel concepts
On the basis of previous considerations, we can conclude that should the electricity from renewable resources storage (using currently considered storage techniques as discussed above) become economically competitive with fossil fuels as a mere heat source, the primary energy from renewables should be at least three times, possibly rather four or five times cheaper than the electricity generated from fossil fuels in conventional coal- gas- or oil-fired power plants. Although the price of electricity from renewables has the decreasing tendency, expecting that it becomes competitive with heat from fossil fuels in a near future, especially if we will waste more than a half thereof during the energy storage and recovery, may not be realistic.
Therefore, should we wish a “carbon neutral” economy, we may basically have two options:
(i) either dispute if we should subsidize rather the renewable electricity in combination with costly hydrogen storage or with one of currently disputed, still highly inefficient power-to-fuel concepts, or, rather, comparably inefficient state-of-art nuclear technology (I am going to add a remark to nuclear technology below), (ii) or seek for an alternative electricity storage method which is so cheap and efficient that it could make, at least in the annual average, the electricity generated from renewables cheaper than the electricity generated from conventional sources.
I personally prefer the option (ii).
4) Remarks regarding nuclear energy as a possible solution for “carbon neutral” future
I do not like to discourage others, however, I am somewhat sceptical with respect to perspective of nuclear energy in view of the current state of nuclear industry.
Please note that, basically, the single concept which they can currently offer are huge PWRs with poor adaptability to grid conditions and extremely poor efficiency of entire power plants about 25 %, on the level of 19th century steam engines. For the extreme regulatory hurdles, they can hardly offer anything significantly improved in a reasonable timeline. Everything is even more complicated by concerns about nuclear weapon proliferation, resulting in plans for burying the spent nuclear fuel forever instead of reprocessing it.
In this respect, it appears that what we can currently afford is heavily subsidized, technically outdated wasting with valuable fissile natural nuclides which are definitely a consumable natural resource.
5) Open space for a quick development in metal-based power-to-fuel concepts towards reversibility / high efficiency
Although just the concept of energy storage in metallic aluminium as presented in the disputed article currently suffers from the common disadvantage of all currently considered alternative fuels – namely, form the absence of a reliable, industrially scalable method for direct metal reconversion into electricity – there may exist other options, wherein this goal could be achievable within a reasonable time schedule.
In 1970-ties, a visionary American inventor Stephen F. Skala filed a series of patent applications proposing cheap alkali metals sodium and potassium as media for a feasible energy storage and transport. Likely, he assumed nuclear energy as a cheap and clean electricity source then, however, this assumption obviously failed:
https://1url.cz/AKtDH https://1url.cz/zKtDR https://1url.cz/7KtD8 https://1url.cz/lKtDy https://1url.cz/OKthL https://1url.cz/UKtht https://1url.cz/sKthz
In my opinion, his vision of Diesel engines fuelled with liquid Na-K alloy and water and producing sodium and potassium hydroxide from which the respective metals can be recovered by electrolysis (the well-known Castner process) may be still appealing, although some aspects like a possible wreckage of a re-build oil tanker full of the alloy explosively reacting with sea water shall be considered very carefully. Similarly, his idea of pipelines serving in parallel for the liquid Na-K alloy transport and as electricity transmission lines might perhaps still deserve an attention of those who consider various alternatives for economically feasible energy transport from sunny desert areas to densely populated regions with a high energy demand.
Interestingly, although Skala obviously researched the relevant state of the art thoroughly and strived to address possible improvements in the efficiency of Castner process, he missed the document which may be crucial for feasibility of the sodium economy, because it possibly opens the doors towards direct reconversion of sodium into electricity. It is the Lockheed patent US 3 730 766 by Geisler,
describing a membrane-free fuel cell, operating with a consumable alkali metal anode and aqueous solution of the respective alkali metal hydroxide as the electrolyte.
If a rapidly flowing very thin electrolyte film may indeed tame the spontaneous sodium reaction with water the way that it may produce useful electricity as described in Geisler’s patent, I believe that this principle could be developed in reliable electricity generators having megawatt outputs within a few years, and reshape the entire landscape of electricity production, storage and transmission within 10-15 years.
The third part will follow.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a31350880/elon-musk...